Dopp Juice Archive

A Jewish friend of mine called me tonight after attending a lecture on the history of Christianity. When I answered the phone he started speaking a mile a minute about charisma, redaction, contradictions, Paul, gentiles, marketing strategies for salvation in ancient times, and the difference between “what likely happened” and “what was written about later on.” The lecture gave him a framework for looking at the story of Jesus in a way that actually made sense to him for the first time in his life, and he was bursting with revelations.

He said, “I had to talk to someone about this, and I knew you’d understand.”

My mom is a liberal UCC minister who is married to a Catholic. My aunt is a Reiki healer who is married to an Episcopal priest. My uncle is a Methodist minister. His son married a female rabbi. My other uncle and his wife and kids are all born-again Christians who have done extensive missionary work in other countries. My other uncle is 17-years sober recovering alcoholic who hits his knees every single morning and every single night to thank God for keeping him alive another day. My grandmother has been teaching Bible Study since God created the heavens and the earth, and she will continue to teach it until she gets swept up by the Rapture.

My mother says, “There are many ways to get to God, but you need to pick one.”

In the spirit of both acceptance and rebellion, I’ve been calling myself an Eclectic Agnostic since I was 16. This means that I don’t care who wrote what down in any book; I acknowledge that I am human, and that I don’t get to know much of anything at all. It also means that I play around in religion like it’s a swimming pool full of finger paints. I’ve considered myself a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Pagan, a Christian, and a whole lot of other things that I’m not quite sure how to label. As far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re all different words for the same experience of feeling connected and recognizing the importance of life.

A friend of mine in high school said to me, “You can’t just up and be a Taoist.”

I walked away from Christianity when I started picking apart the words. The image of a personified God made absolutely no sense to me. I put my hands on my hips and announced defiantly, “No, there is NOT an old man with a long grey beard in a white robe sitting in a big chair in the sky behind a pearly gate, pushing buttons and turning levers and determining what’s going to happen to us next. Uh-uh. No way. Ya’ll are stupid.” Fortunately for me, my über-religious family is also extraordinarily patient and accepting of the fact that people need to find their own paths. I’m a logic-brained writer. My path takes language very seriously.

If images of God are just metaphors, then aren’t monotheism and polytheism essentially talking about the same thing?

So I picked it apart. For awhile, I was convinced that Time was my higher power. It’s way more powerful than me. I’m always trying to speed it up or slow it down and I have absolutely zero impact on it. It’s also a reliable force to lean on when I need help. If I just let Time do it’s job while I focus on doing my own, it will pretty consistently save my ass.

That’s like God, right?

But I keep coming back to the core of my spirituality — a space in my life that I only started to be able to refer to as God again about a year ago (although I find I get fewer raised eyebrows when I refer to it as “The Universe” in the Bay Area). I recently grappled with it from a gender perspective and ended up with a beautiful poem that healed a lot of my old anger.

If we are all made in the image of God, then how in God’s name can God be gendered?

Tonight I found my thoughts on someone else’s blog. The completely amazing Emma McCreary wrote a beautiful post about the difference between our culture’s old ideas of God versus its new ideas of God. It perfectly sums up the tension I’ve felt around religions and explains why I keep going back to it: the new ideas work for me. In typical Emma fashion, she writes in a voice that is fluent in both Business and Spirituality — a mix I too rarely get to enjoy. Please go read her post, God is Bottom-Up, and tell me if it doesn’t resolve all of this stuff and put us all onto the same page once and for all.

I think the joy ninja’s got it.